Reviews
In this new collection, Tracy Daugherty is the maestro of middle age, and his recurrent character, Bern, is an everyman of modern times. Daugherty writes with great skill, empathy and humor of Bern's travails and longings. The Empire of the Dead is a superb book of stories that will burnish Daugherty's already formidable reputation as a contemporary master of short fiction.
While Tracy Daugherty’s intricate, intriguing, and interconnected stories in The Empire of the Dead are relentlessly narrative they invoke Donald Barthelme’s observation that collage is the art form of the century. These rich fictions are amalgams, jeweled aggregates, beautiful breccia that sculpt the word, matrix by matrix, into lyric concreteness. Like Barthelme, Daugherty works the leading edge of this gorgeous junk phenomena, transforming these complex meditations of our states of being into wholly new and sublime states of matter.
Book Details
I.
I Have the Room Above Her
Suitor
The Empire of the Dead
Art and Architecture
II.
Signs
The Magnitudes
III.
Basement and Roof
Acknowledgments